{"id":39421,"date":"2018-01-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/youre-not-as-virtuous-as-you-think\/"},"modified":"2018-01-29T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-29T00:00:00","slug":"youre-not-as-virtuous-as-you-think","status":"publish","type":"sermon-illustrations","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/youre-not-as-virtuous-as-you-think\/","title":{"rendered":"You&#8217;re Not as Virtuous as You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A 1961 research project asked ordinary people to send extremely painful electric shocks to a stranger. (Unbeknownst to the participants, the fake shocks were only delivered to an actor.) A staggering 65 percent of the subjects obeyed. Most of us are confident we would have been in the 35 percent who refused to go along with this program.<\/p>\n\n<p>But in his essay, &quot;You&#39;re Not as Virtuous as You Think,&quot; Nitin Nohria, the Dean of the Harvard Business School, has a name for this &quot;gap between how people believe they would behave and how they actually behave.&quot; He calls it &quot;moral overconfidence.&quot; Nohria insightfully notes our need for repentance and confession:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>In the lab, in the classroom and beyond, we tend to be less virtuous than we think we are. And a little moral humility could benefit us all. Moral overconfidence is on display in politics, in business, in sports&mdash;really, in all aspects of life &hellip; There are political candidates who say they won&#39;t use attack ads until, late in the race, they&#39;re moral overconfidence is in line with what studies find to be our generally inflated view of ourselves. We rate ourselves as above-average drivers, investors, and employees, even though math dictates that can&#39;t be true for all of us. We also tend to believe we are less likely than the typical person to exhibit negative qualities and to experience negative life events: to get divorced, become depressed, or have a heart attack.<\/p>\n\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tax_ctp_audience":[],"tax_ctp_authors":[],"tax_ctp_categories":[165],"tax_ctp_format":[171],"tax_ctp_illustration_types":[411],"tax_ctp_multimedia":[],"tax_ctp_point_editor":[],"tax_publications":[140],"tax_ctp_tags":[3436,3508,3559,3726,3848,4125,4181,4191,4491,4702,4704,4909,4913,4917,4929,5227],"tax_ctp_topics":[],"class_list":["post-39421","sermon-illustrations","type-sermon-illustrations","status-publish","hentry","tax_publications-ct-pastors","tax_ctp_tags-arrogance","tax_ctp_tags-boasting","tax_ctp_tags-character","tax_ctp_tags-culture","tax_ctp_tags-ego","tax_ctp_tags-haughtiness","tax_ctp_tags-human-nature","tax_ctp_tags-humiliation","tax_ctp_tags-morality","tax_ctp_tags-presumption","tax_ctp_tags-pride","tax_ctp_tags-self-centeredness","tax_ctp_tags-self-deception","tax_ctp_tags-self-esteem","tax_ctp_tags-self-reliance","tax_ctp_tags-vanity"],"acf":{"scripture_references":[{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null}]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>You&#039;re Not as Virtuous as You Think - CT Pastors<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/youre-not-as-virtuous-as-you-think\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"You&#039;re Not as Virtuous as You Think - CT Pastors\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A 1961 research project asked ordinary people to send extremely painful electric shocks to a stranger. 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